“He’s a fine one to talk about not being afraid. Running away from his duty and his family like this. Why doesn’t he work some of that magic of his on himself? Tell me that. Drag his pitiful, cowardly self back here and spare his family a world of disgrace and embarrassment, not to mention a beautiful, innocent girl.”
“He would if he could,” the Brukh woman said, and the widow beside her, who had said nothing, heaved a sigh. “I really do believe that, Mrs. Shpilman.”
“And why can’t he? Tell me that.”
“You know.”
“I don’t know anything.”
But she did know. Apparently, so did these two strange women who had come to watch her cry. Mrs. Shpilman dropped into a white-painted Louis XIV chair with a needlepoint cushion, heedless of creases that this sudden plunge made in the silk of her dress. She covered her face with her hands and cried. For the shame and the indignity. For the ruination of months, and years, of planning and hopes and discussion, the endless embassies and back-and-forth between the courts of Verbov and Shtrakenz. But mostly, she confesses, she cried for herself. Because she had determined with her customary resolve that she would never see her only, beloved, rotten son again.
What a selfish woman! It was only later that she thought to spare a moment’s regret for the world that Mendel would never redeem.
After Mrs. Shpilman had been crying for a minute or two, the frumpy widow rose from the other wing chair and came to stand beside her.
“Please,” she said in a heavy voice, and put a plump hand on Mrs. Shpilman’s arm, a hand whose knuckles were covered in fine golden hair. It was hard to believe that only twenty years ago, Mrs. Shpilman had been able to fit the entire thing into her mouth.
“You’re playing games,” Mrs. Shpilman said, once she had regained the power of rational thought. In the wake of the initial shock, which stopped her heart, she felt a strange sense of relief. If Mendel was nine layers deep, then eight of those layers were pure goodness. Goodness far better than she and her husband, hard people who had survived and prospered in a hard world, could have engendered from their own flesh without some kind of divine intercession. But the innermost layer, the ninth layer of Mendel Shpilman, was and always had been a devil, a shkotz that liked to give heart attacks to his mother. “You’re playing games!”
“No.”
He lifted the veil and let her see the pain, the uncertainty. She saw that he feared he was making a grave mistake. She recognized as her own the determination with which he was willing to make it.
“No, Mama,” Mendel said. “I came to say goodbye.” Then, reading the expression on her face, with a shaky smile: “And no, I’m not a transvestite.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No!”
“You look like a transvestite to me.”
“A noted expert.”
“I want you out of this house.” But she only wanted him to stay, hidden on her side of the house, dressed in that frumpy rag, her baby, her princeling, her devilish boy.
“I’m going.”
“I never want to see you again. I don’t want to call you, I don’t want you to call me. I don’t want to know where you are.”
She had only to summon her husband, and Mendel would stay. In some way that was no more unthinkable than the underlying facts of her comfortable life, they would make him stay.
“All right, Mama,” he said.
“Don’t call me that.”
“All right, Mrs. Shpilman,” he said, and in his mouth it sounded affectionate, familiar. She started to cry again. “But just so you know. I’m staying with a friend.”
Was there a lover? Was it possible for him to have led a life so secret?
“A ‘friend’?” she said.
“An old friend. He’s just helping me. Mrs. Brukh here is helping me, too.”
“Mendel saved my life,” said Mrs. Brukh. “Once upon a time.”
“Big deal,” said Mrs. Shpilman. “So he saved your life. A lot of good it did him.”
“Mrs. Shpilman,” said Mendel. He took her hands and clasped them tightly between his own warm palms. His skin burned two degrees hotter than everyone else’s. When you took his temperature, the thermometer read 100.6.
“Get your hands off me,” she managed to say. “Now.”
He kissed her on the top of the head, and even through the layer of alien hair, the imprint of that kiss seemed to linger. Then he let go of her hands, lowered his veil, and lumbered out of the room, hose sagging, with the Brukh woman hurrying out behind him.
Mrs. Shpilman sat in the Louis XIV chair for a long time, hours, years. A coldness filled her, an icy disgust for Creation, for God and His misbegotten works. At first the horror she felt seemed to bear upon her son and the sin that he was refusing to surrender, but then it turned into a horror for herself. She considered the crimes and hurts that had been committed to her benefit, and all of that evil only a drop of water in a great black sea. An awful place, this sea, this gulf between the Intention and the Act that people called “the world.” Mendel’s flight was not a refusal to surrender; it was a surrender. The Tzaddik Ha-Dor was tendering his resignation. He could not be what that world and its Jews, in the rain with their heartaches and their umbrellas, wanted him to be, what his mother and father wanted him to be. He could not even be what he wanted himself to be. She hoped—sitting there, she prayed—that one day, at least, he might find a way to be what he was.
As soon as the prayer flew upward from her heart, she missed her son. She longed for her son. She reproached herself bitterly for having sent Mendel away without first finding out where he was staying, where he would go, how she could see him or hear his voice from time to time. Then she opened the hands he had enfolded a last time in his, and found, curled in her right palm, a tiny length of string.
26
Yes,” she says, “I heard from him. From time to time. I don’t want this to sound cynical, Detective, but it was usually when he was in trouble or needed money. Circumstances that, in Mendel’s case, may his name be for a blessing, tended to coincide.”
“When was the last time?”
“Earlier this year. Last spring. Yes, I remember it was the day before Erev Pesach.”
“So, April. Around—”
The lady Rudashevsky takes out a fancy Shoyfer Mazik, starts pressing buttons, and comes up with the date of the day preceding the first evening of Passover. Landsman remarks, a little startled, that it was also the last full day of his sister’s life.
“Where was he calling from?”
“Maybe a hospital. I don’t know. I could hear a public address, a loudspeaker, in the background. Mendel said he was going to disappear. That he had to disappear for a while, that he wouldn’t be able to call. He asked me to send money to a box down in Povorotny that he sometimes used.”
“Did he sound afraid?”
The veil trembles like a theater curtain, secret motions taking place on its other side. She nods slowly.
“Did he say why he needed to disappear? Did he say somebody was after him?”
“I don’t think so. No. Just that he needed money and he was going to disappear.”
“And that’s it.”
“As far as I—No. Yes. I asked him if he was eating. He sometimes—They forget to eat.”
“I know it.”
“And he told me, ‘Don’t worry,’ he says, ‘I just ate a whole big piece of cherry pie.’”
“Pie,” Landsman says. “Cherry pie.”
“Does that mean something to you?”
“You never know,” he says, but he can feel his rib cage ringing under the mallet of his heart. “Mrs. Shpilman, you said you heard a loudspeaker. Do you think he might have been calling from an airport?”
“Now that you mention it, yes.”
The car slows and stops. Landsman sits forward and looks out through the smoked glass. They’re in front of the Hotel Zamenhof. Mrs. Shpilman drops her window with a button, and the gray aft
ernoon blows into the car. She raises the veil and peers up at the face of the hotel. She stares at it for a long time. A pair of seedy men, alcoholics, one of whom Landsman once prevented from accidentally urinating into the other’s trouser cuff, stagger out of the hotel’s lobby slung against each other, a human lean-to thrown up against the rain. They put on a vaudeville with a sheet of newspaper and the wind, then lurch off into the night, a couple of tattered moths. The queen of Verbov Island lowers the veil again and puts her window up. Landsman can feel the reproachful questions burning through the black tissue. How can he stand to live in such a dump? Why didn’t he do a better job of protecting her son?
“Who told you that I lived here?” he thinks to ask her. “Your son-in-law?”
“No, he didn’t mention it. I heard about it from the other Detective Landsman. The one you used to be married to.”
“She told you about me?”
“She telephoned today. Once, many years ago, we had some trouble with a man who was hurting women. A very bad man, a sick man. This was back in the Harkavy, on S. Ansky Street. The women who had been hurt didn’t want to talk to the police. Your ex-wife was very helpful to me then, and I’m still in her debt. She is a good woman. A good policewoman.”
“No doubt about it.”
“She suggested to me that if you happened to come around, I wouldn’t be entirely mistaken in putting some confidence in you.”
“That was nice of her,” Landsman says with perfect sincerity.
“She spoke more highly of you than I would have imagined.”
“Like you said, ma’am. She’s a good woman.”
“But you left her anyway.”
“Not because she was a good woman.”
“Because you were a bad man?”
“I think I was,” Landsman says. “She was too polite to say so.”
“It has been many years,” Mrs. Shpilman says. “But as I recall, politeness was not a great strength of that Jewess.” She pushes the button that unlocks the door. Landsman opens the door and climbs down from the back of the limousine. “At any rate, I’m glad that I hadn’t seen this dreadful hotel before now, or I never would have let you anywhere near me.”
“It’s not much,” Landsman says, rain pattering the brim of his hat. “But it’s home.”
“No, it isn’t,” Batsheva Shpilman says. “But I’m sure it makes it easier for you to think so.”
27
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,’” says the pie man.
He peers at Landsman across the steel counter of his shop, crossing his arms to show that he is wise to the stratagems of Jews. He narrows his eyes as if he’s trying to spot a typographical error on the face of a counterfeit Rolex. Landsman’s American is just good enough to make him sound suspect.
“That’s right,” Landsman says. He wishes there weren’t a corner missing from his membership card in the Sitka chapter of the Hands of Esau, the international fraternal organization of Jewish policemen. It has a six-point shield in one corner. Its text is printed in Yiddish. It carries no authority or weight, not even with Landsman, a member in good standing for twenty years. “We’re all over the world.”
“That doesn’t surprise me one bit,” the pie man says with a show of asperity. “But, mister, I only serve pie.”
“Are you eating pie or aren’t you?” says the pie man’s wife. Like her husband, she is ample and pale. Her hair is the colorless color of a sheet of foil under a wan light. The daughter is in the back among the berries and the crusts. To the bush pilots, hunters, rescue crews, and other regulars who frequent the airfield at Yakovy, it’s considered a piece of luck to spot the pie man’s daughter. Landsman hasn’t seen her for years. “If you don’t want any pie, there is no earthly reason to be wasting your time at this window. People behind you have planes to catch.”
She takes the card from her husband and hands it back to Landsman. He does not blame her for her rudeness. The Yakovy airfield is a key station on the northern route of the world’s shysters, charlatans, grift doctors, and real estate hacks. Poachers, smugglers, wayward Russians. Drug mules, Native criminals, Yankee hard cases. The Yakovy jurisdiction has never quite been defined. Jews, Indians, and Klondikes all make their claims. Her pie has greater moral character than half her clientele. The pie lady has no reason to trust or to coddle Landsman, with his gimcrack card and a shaved patch on the back of his head. Still, her rudeness gives him a sharp pang of regret for the loss of his badge. If Landsman had a badge, he would say, The people behind me can go fuck themselves, lady, and you can give yourself a nice thick boysenberry high colonic. Instead, he makes a show of considering the individuals gathered in a moderately long line behind him. Fisherman, kayakers, small businessmen, some corporate types.
Each of them comes up with a noise or bit of eyebrow semaphore to show that he is eager for pie and losing patience with Landsman and his dog-eared credentials.
“I will have a piece of the apple crumble,” Landsman says. “Of which I have fond memories.”
“The crumble is my favorite,” says the wife, softening a little. She sends her husband to the back counter with a nod. The crumble is there on a gleaming pedestal, a fresh one, uncut. “Coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
“À la mode?”
“No, thanks.” Landsman slides the photograph of Mendel Shpilman across the counter. “What about you? Ever seen him?”
The woman eyes the photo with each hand tucked carefully into the opposite armpit. Landsman gauges that she recognizes Shpilman right away. Then she turns to take from her husband a paper plate laden with a slice of crumble. She sets it on a tray with a small Styrofoam cup of coffee and a plastic fork rolled up in a paper napkin.
“Two-fifty,” she says. “Go sit by the bear.”
The bear was shot by yids of the sixties. Doctors, from the look of them, in ski caps and Pendletons. They brim with the odd, bespectacled manliness of that golden period in the history of the District of Sitka. A card, typed in Yiddish and American, is pinned to the wall underneath the photograph of the fatal five men. It says that the bear, shot near Lisianski, was a 3.7-meter, four-hundred-kilo brown. Only its skeleton is preserved inside the glass case beside which Landsman sits down with his slice of apple crumble and his cup of coffee. He has sat here many times in the past, contemplating this terrible ivory xylophone over a piece of pie. Most recently, he sat here with his sister, maybe a year before she died. He was working the Gorsetmacher case. She had just dropped off a party of fishermen coming in from the bush.
Landsman thinks about Naomi. It is a luxury, like a slice of pie. It is as dangerous and welcome as a drink. He invents dialogue for Naomi, the words with which she might mock and ridicule him if she were here. For his sanguinary roll in the snow with those Zilberblat idiots. For drinking ginger ale with a pious old lady in the back of that hypertrophied four-by-four. For thinking he could outlast his drinking problem and stay hyped long enough to find the killer of Mendel Shpilman. For the loss of his badge. For lacking the necessary outrage about Reversion, for having no stance toward it. Naomi claimed that she hated Jews for their meek submission to fate, for the trust they put in God or the gentiles. But then Naomi had a stance toward everything. She policed and maintained her stances; buffed and curated them. She would also, Landsman thinks, have criticized his choice not to take his pie à la mode.
“The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” says the pie man’s daughter, sitting down on the bench beside Landsman. She has taken off her apron and washed her hands. Above the elbows, her freckled arms are dusted with flour. There is flour in her blond eyebrows. She wears her hair tied back in a black elastic. She is a hauntingly plain woman with watery blue eyes, about Landsman’s age. She gives off a smell of butter, tobacco, and a sour tang of dough that he finds weirdly erotic. She lights a menthol cigarette and sends a jet of smoke toward him. “That’s a new one.”
She tucks the cigarette into her mouth and holds out her hand to
take the membership card. She pretends not to struggle with its text. “I can read Yiddish, you know,” she says finally. “It’s not like it’s fucking Aztec or whatever.”
“I really am a policeman,” Landsman says. “I’m just making a private inquiry today. That is why I don’t use the badge.”
“Show me the picture,” she says. Landsman hands her the mug shot of Mendel Shpilman. She nods, and the carapace of her weariness splits along a momentary seam.
“Miss, you knew him?”
She hands back the mug shot. Shakes her head, makes a dismissive frown. “What happened to him?” she says.
“He was murdered,” Landsman says. “Shot in the head.”
“That’s harsh,” she says. “Oh, Jesus.”
Landsman takes a fresh package of tissues from the pocket of his overcoat and passes them to her. She blows her nose and then balls up the tissue in her fist.
“How did you know him?” Landsman says.
“I gave him a ride,” she says. “One time. That’s it.”
“To where?”
“A motel down on Route Three. I liked him. He was funny. He was sweet. Kind of homely. Kind of a mess. He told me he had a, you know, a problem. With drugs. But that he was trying to get better. He seemed—He just had this way about him.”
“Comforting?”
“Mm. No. He was just, uh, really, I don’t know. Really there. For like an hour, I thought I was in love with him.”
“But you weren’t really?”
“I guess I never really got the chance to find out.”
“Did you have sex with him?”
“You’re a cop, all right,” she says. “A ‘noz,’ isn’t that it?”
“That’s right.”
“No, I didn’t have sex with him. I wanted to. I invited myself into the motel room with him. I guess I kind of, like, you know. Threw myself at him. That’s no reflection on him. Like I said, he was super nice and all, but he was a mess. His teeth. Anyway, I guess he picked up on it.”
“Picked up on what?”